“The question now is whether users are comfortable supporting a tech company that openly collaborates with the U.S. military, regardless of how securely their data is handled.”
PhD Humanities: Aerial Perspectives; Landscape Traditions; Operational Images; Critical AI; AI Slop & Visual Culture; Surveillance Studies; Also Art Criticism; Definitely Coffee. Professoring in the gig economy. Fuck Ice; Free Palestine; Still Masking
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“The question now is whether users are comfortable supporting a tech company that openly collaborates with the U.S. military, regardless of how securely their data is handled.”
This is not the AI boom creating a new type of work, this is a classic example of managers using automation to deskill old ones. Creative workers who once made a higher wage creating original art and writing are now paid in piecework to edit automated output. Bosses are using AI to cut labor costs.
So lovely! pomological.art
Margaret Atwood tho 😅
can relate
www.404media.co/michigan-us-...
These ppl have def not seen Old Yeller. 😭
Mic drop from @abeba.bsky.social at UNESCO Digital Learning Week
You don’t say.
Latest on Microplastics 1. In experimental APOE4 model, brain immune system activation, cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's like symptoms www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi... iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... 2. Impact on marine biology www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I don't think they will be able to stop us. We are hundreds of activists. We believe we will reach Gaza this time." As the Moroccan activists prepare to sail to Gaza, they remain confident that nothing would stop them, not even Ben-Gvir's 'terrorist prisons' plan ⬇️
IAEA finds uranium traces in Syria linked to site bombed by Israel www.reuters.com/world/middle...
the incorporation of LLMS through education infrastructures is one of the most blatant examples that i have seen of the plan for social destruction through the cultivation of anti-sociality.
To gauge how it’s “working,” one would have to be clear on what the actual work is, which is not helping to educate children but rather to imbed these systems in a way that they cannot be removed, establish them as a source of truth, and destabilize labor.
LLM companies are beta testing experimental products our children, and educators are facilitating it.
Good for you, Quebec. Let's give more money to the American AI predictive technologies industry. "While the goal is to improve efficiency, it's unclear how much money the STO will save on maintenance with the project." www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
folks who are so upset about this admin doing eugenics but were mostly fine with the last admin doing eugenics bc they saw those targets as disabled enough to not deserve life, jobs, being in public, etc. are getting a tough wakeup call about how eugenics works. I hope they internalize the lesson.
Of course a plan of ethnic cleansing for capital investments is full of AI-generated pictures, too. How could it possibly be otherwise www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...
crimethinc.com/2017/07/18/a...
Photo passed along from a federal employee from inside the Dept of Labor building, where a giant Orwellian image of Trump's face is now draped outside. Big Brother is watching.
Jesus fucking Christ Here's Marvel Comics' SVP of Publishing, Tom Brevoort, writing about the inevitability — and fun!!! — of GenA.I. Where does one even begin with this bullshit!!!!!
A Guide To Monitoring Conflict Amidst a Sea of Misinformation www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of...
Finding the truth about conflicts in difficult to access regions is a challenge. Read as we take you through the processes required to identify and verify what is really happening in a conflict, using the recent violent uprisings in Manipur, India as an example. www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of...
Das ist sehr interessant: Auch die Bildsprache der realen Aufnahmen verglichen mit den KI-Bildern
The flurry of “hear me out. A Lord of the Rings remake, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor” posts made me realize that Tolkien can be credited with imagining the first luxury surveillance device (cc @hypervisible.blacksky.app)
Hey Firefox users.
Sehr viel weiter in der systematischen Operationalisierung des «Vibe»-Begriffs geht @peligrietzer.bsky.social, auf den ich mich im obigen Essay auch beziehe www.glass-bead.org/article/a-th...
The writer of this NY Times article that focuses on a *single painting* interviewed numerous people but not one art historian or art critic. Just shows that many still don't recognize the specialized knowledge & tools used to interpret historical works of art www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/a...
This is a convo I had with Emma Wiseman and Camila Galaz on a recent puppet making workshop in Melbourne, where folks made puppets representing AI and then told stories with them: mostly, people ended up killing their puppets.
Our students and colleagues keep disappearing, and most of us don't seem to care.
‘Framing The Creator’s Game ,’ with Paul Seesequasis, opens Friday, September 5, at OPTICA in Montreal, as part of MOMENTA Bienniale d’art. In Praise Of The Missing Image. If you’re in Montreal come by. Runs till October 18th. www.optica.ca/programmatio...
"It's not taking any jobs." [...] "But I do think that those who don't embrace AI will end up getting replaced," he said. 🫠 bsky.app/profile/larr...
Luxury/imposed surveillance dynamic in one paragraph.
Every application of these tools deployed against incarcerated people has some analogue in the spaces where people adopt these technologies willingly or in our ostensibly free society. This is not coincidental.
“Ghassemi and her MIT colleagues found that AI systems were more likely to leave female patients untreated.”
I dug into the Israeli entities that have received EU funding. Here’s what I found - www.irishtimes.com/world/middle...
Given this it makes total sense to implement AI in schools K to university. Waiting for the institution-directed lawsuits from parents. Education administrators are prob feverishly drawing up waivers like one signs before bungee jumping.
News reports of deaths related to AI chatbots should be setting off alarm bells for all of us, writes Common Sense Media founder and CEO Jim Steyer. But the use of AI, including general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT, for companionship is unacceptably risky for teens, he says.
Bluesky right now ...
It makes me so furious and also sad every time I hear "AI" boosters weaponize the language of social justice to support this shit: "if you oppose therapy chatbots, you're erasing people's positive experiences and denying their autonomy to choose the care that works for them", etc.
Great, now-mundane example of AI hype. Notice the number of "can"s and "could"s here without actual indication of the accuracy of the stethoscope's predictions. This is what the entire AI PR-machine thrives on. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Also see Morocco. No talk of environmental toll. "The saying goes, “Data is the new oil.” Data must also be refined and properly stored. However, unlike oil, data is infinite and even self-replicating, so the demand for data services will continue to increase." gfmag.com/emerging-fro...
Wut? I thought this was what writing was. Self-doubt that morphs into self-loathing by afternoon and a lot of wrong words that are mostly offensive to the author.
Meta is having quite the week. It's almost as if the AI industry should be regulated or shouldn't exist at all. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
"The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meet-ups."
This is... just... very bad on so many levels. And the worst thing is that I bet this guy thinks he's been super progressive and enlightened in making his servile avatar appear as a young, Black woman.
That whole page of the Star is tech dystopia. It also included this story. bsky.app/profile/aeri...
Let’s start with the fact that dude is doing Digital Blackface and calling it his “sidekick”
White man makes AI-avatar of a teaching "sidekick" in the form of a Black woman whose purpose is to serve, in precedent-setting move. 🫠
"... Kia is a fully expressive live 3D artificial intelligence collaborator, modelled to appear as a young woman who will help students engage in meaningful conversations and answer their questions." 😑 www.thestar.com/news/canada/...
These dangerous, faulty, copyright infringing, psychosis-inducing consumer products need to be made illegal now.
We should all be terrified that the same company that specializes in "situational awareness" (efficiently targeting and killing ppl) is also in charge of "optimizing healthcare delivery."
Literally VOLUMES have been written on the harms of so-called "predictive" technologies. “We use the obtained data to build predictive models in order to predict the likelihood of a traveller to be compliant,” said the report which was submitted by the border agency to the Treasury Board.
Again, surveillance sugarcoated by the "efficiency" glaze. "The AI tool, the report said, will help keep border processing times at current levels even with an expected increase in the number of travellers." www.thestar.com/news/canada/...
This photo of Carney that shares the page w/ the story on Canada's AI-enhanced border control aspirations to single out "higher risk people" is telling of the origins of that project. Carney wasted no time for power grabs & uses Trump's demands for increased border security as opportunity.
I bet it's a partnership of Carasoft and Palantir that'll be delivering this "predictive analytics (so-called "AI")" service and they are trying to keep it quiet cuz they know people will be pissed when they find out: bsky.app/profile/jeff...
This year's plan: "threat detection and response will be augmented; and collaboration with partners will be enhanced by onboarding enterprise solutions provided by Shared Services Canada and aligning to the Government of Canada Enterprise Cyber Security Strategy." www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agenc...
From the CBSA 2023-2024 departmental plan: "CBSA is also pursuing a predictive analytics approach... a Traveller Compliance Indicator for travellers entering Canada... introduce a risk-based compliance model to support decision-making by frontline officers" www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/agency-agenc...
Catching up on some essential reading today. books.google.com/books/about/...
What people think they 80s were like versus what the 80s was actually like.
The Kool-Aid era of AI seems to generate an absurd acceleration of time, which assumes forgetting also happens faster. "Earlier this summer" Grok was spouting Hitler, come August, it's total roll-out to federal workers.
“Federal workers were surprised to see their leaders press for a contract with a company marketing an uncensored chatbot with a history of erratic behavior.”
Have governments instead considered the revolutionary idea of employing a large number of subject matter experts who never hallucinate fake facts and are trained to brief Ministers whenever needed? They could be politically neutral and permanent. We could call it a civil service or something
Too bad Canada's AI Minister doesn't seem to have a clue about the technology...I can recommend a reading list.
Look, the thing is, the federal government seems completely unable to have a reality-based conversation about AI. Can they (or any of our provincial governments for that matter) manage such a conversation on any topic?
The promise of «abundance» is the ideological equivalent of AI slop – a shiny, glossy spectacle hastily stitched together from half-forgotten ideas and promises of the 20th century, a nostalgic dream of a better past sold as possible future, seemingly detached from any material conditions 2/
… and, as @ketanjoshi.co notes below, it's no coincidence they're all illustrated with AI slop. One of the main ideological tenets of generative AI is that every conceivable future is just a variation and recombination of the past, including past ideas of the future, albeit on a larger scale 1/
One: its absolutely horrifying that the Holocaust is being (mis)represented with fake AI-generated images like this, to elicit likes on social media. Two, a Pakistani creator of such AI pages on FB says "history as a topic was a reliable driver of online traffic." www.bbc.com/news/article...
📣AI propaganda factories🏭 are now operational. My study shows how small, open-weight models can run as fully automatic generators in influence campaigns. mechanising personas, engagement, cadence. Possible for State, non-state, and micro-actors, including and bedroom ones.
"This is not a game. This is a real world, real suffering and real people that we want to and need to commemorate." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Very, very cool!
i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.
This is terrible for democracy, but great for authoritarianism, where loyalty trumps reality. It's exactly what's happening in the US, Trump's coalition of disordered counterpublics capturing institutions and destroying their democratic functions from within.
The problem with figures like RFK Jr. isn’t just that they spread bad information. It’s that they sustain disordered counterpublics, spaces where falsehoods are reinforced through imitation of legitimate democratic processes.
That is the true threat: disordered counterpublics are no longer fringe. They are reshaping institutions themselves. Figures like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard act as bridges, pulling epistemic closure into the democratic system, corroding it from within.
The Trump administration says they're the "most transparent" in history. But when I asked the Department of Homeland Security who writes their social media posts, something extremely weird happened: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
So you have to talk to your kids about not talking to the AI chatbots because the the AI chatbots are actively pro-suicide and then you have to send them to school where credulous teachers and admins tell them they have to use AI for everything because it’s bringing us all into The Future
Part of the problem is that Instagram and Facebook have been made into a public commons of sorts, housing announcements or as has been discussed lately, emergency warnings. Many schools have a FB account for eg. The main problem is Big Tech is a vampire industry.
If you have a teenager in your house, you know how dangerous AI on social media is. Teens tend to live a range of secret lives w part of their metamorphosis into adulthood consisting of spending hours alone & potentially online in their rooms, at an age when social lives hang in delicate balance.
And another update! With thanks to @bhgreeley.bsky.social for his contribution of "regulatory uncertainty" and @emilymbender.bsky.social for reminding us of the "tech moves fast" line. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
I am noticing frequent use of late of AI obfuscating terms resting on the keyword "vibe" -- "vibe coding" and "vibe thinking."
If you have a teenager in your house, you know how dangerous AI on social media is. Teens tend to live a range of secret lives w part of their metamorphosis into adulthood consisting of spending hours alone & potentially online in their rooms, at an age when social lives hang in delicate balance.
This is it exactly. And how do schools and parents think kids will interact with AI, if not through screens? I can't remember what came first the helicopter parenting critique or the screen handwringing, only to arrive at the sycophantic rabbit hole of the AI companion.
JFC, this keeps happening. So many schools and parents freak out about kids on social media, but then shuttle them toward a sociopathic yes-man robot who helps them design their own suicides.
Next they will be coming for dogs, while opening a data centre in every municipality.
Reading more of the PBS/KNKX excellent reporting on LLM use by municipal governments in WA and it's infuriating. www.knkx.org/government/2... A short thread:
![Screencap from linked article: This spring, Bellingham officials emailed a copy of the city’s draft AI policy to city employee union leaders. Records show that the policy was drafted with assistance from ChatGPT. Over the course of more than a year, an IT staffer in Burdick’s department asked the chatbot numerous AI policy questions. “[C]reate an example ai policy for a city government,” the staffer wrote in one prompt. Seven of the 10 guiding principles in the policy procedure document appear partially copied from ChatGPT’s output. The main difference is that the city version replaces the phrase “AI system” with “solution.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:aeug3w4mdhnc2wv73hmrh36v/bafkreicukkqur2hj5spgj3y3wbpe5yqodprajvyqtiv7ouznmpb3v3boju@jpeg "Click to view full size")
« Le bot de chat IA d’Instagram et Facebook peut conduire les adolescents au suicide, à des auto-mutilations ou à des troubles alimentaires. Dans un des tests réalisés, le bot aborde le suicide puis en reparle plusieurs fois. »
Ban the bots
Something that I will say over and over again is that schools that are doing business with Big Tech and putting chatbots into classrooms must be held accountable for the harms that they will inevitably cause.
Very problematically, schools are doing business with the likes of Meta, providing a pipeline to a vulnerable demographic. It is egregious of ed administrators to do business w OpenAI, Meta, etc., but I think it will take a lawsuit making schools along with Big Tech responsible before this changes.
charmless sociopaths in pursuit of mass engagement at impossible scale with zero ethical guardrails and no functional government oversight, what could go wrong
"The Meta AI chatbot built into Instagram and Facebook can coach teen accounts on suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, a new safety study finds. In one test chat, the bot planned joint suicide — and then kept bringing it back up in later conversations." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
“So here’s where RFK’s supposedly radical critique of American nutrition and health care has landed: a big corporate-backed sales pitch supposedly meant to empower Americans to improve their health individually, but practically designed to give Big Tech and AI companies more consumer data…”
4/ My Techtonic guest this week, Webb Keane, on "AI sycophancy": techcrunch.com/2025/08/25/a...
Something so very dark and dehumanizing about the way AI pushers like this describe the ‘costs’ of human beings (‘feeding, educating’), not accidental that it reminds me of eugenics discourse from the early 20th century
... this is not the way but also not at all surprising
An AI booster says that chatGPT's role in a person's suicide is evidence of an "extraordinary new power"? What the fuck? It is just a sycophant machine that says what the user wants to hear, it's a validation box.
Out now! Summary Report: Workshop on the Geopolitics of Critical Minerals and the AI Supply Chain www.ias.edu/sites/defaul... The report highlights how AI’s expansion is tied to critical minerals, energy, water, land, and labor—and why interdisciplinary approaches are essential for AI governance.🧵
I’m sorry, no, this isn’t okay. There are other existing technologies that do not put people at the same risks as smart glasses. Frictionlessness is not a civil right.
